UCSD to test anti-terrorism robot

A robot that can climb stairs even though its no bigger than a dinner plate might evolve into a tool for detecting and evaluating biological and chemical attacks by terrorists.

Engineers at UC San Diego are installing sensors on a small army of the robots to see if they can spot and predict the movement of harmless smoke that will be released during a controlled experiment on campus this summer.

"Ultimately, such a vehicle could be fitted with a variety of chem/rad/bio sensors, video, or the like," said Thomas Bewley, the UCSD mechanical engineer and principal investigator who has been overseeing the conversion of the vehicle in the university's Coordinated Robotics Lab.

The 1' by 1' robot, known as Switchblade, is part of a larger effort by UCSD and other institutions to develop autonomous robots that can be used in homeland security and urban warfare. Such research already has produced the sort of bomb disposal robots featured in the Oscar-winning film, "Hurt Locker."

Nick Morozovsky, one of Bewley's doctoral students, has taken the lead for the project, which involves equipping 12 Switchblades with sensors that can detect particulate from smoke that will be released in a campus parking lot.

"We'll have 12 robots running around all at the same time, measuring the smoke, its concentration and the wind velocity," Morozovsky said. "The data will be sent to a supercomputer and be used to predict where the plume will expand to.

"The robots will receive a command to go to a certain location, but they'll plan out their path so that they can avoid collisions. They're autonomous."

The project, partly developed with backing from National Instruments of Austin, TX. and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is meant to be a step along an evolutionary path for Switchblade. And that path could lead to broader uses than homeland security.

"These kinds of robots could be used not only to detect bioagents, but things like the ash that was coming out of a volcano in Iceland and shutting down airports in Europe," said Morozovsky. "You could have flying robots that would look to see where the ash would go. Or you could put them in water and have them look at things like the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. There's a lot of potential uses."